I have an apparent edge case that doesn't quite fit the Schedules Direct concept, if I'm interpreting my results correctly. I've asked the developer of the Sage JSON SD interface I'm using, and he was able to verify what I suspected - the limitation appears to be on the SD side.

I have four different sources for watching live video in Sage. Three of these are easy (2 subscription satellite providers and 1 local OTA) because they have SD lineups. All of those work fine. But I have several tuners that receive free-to-air (FTA) satellite channels from dozens of satellites. There is no SD lineup that covers those channels.

Before converting Sage to SD, I used their soon-to-be-lost Zap2It-licensed service. I never used a lineup for the FTA channels, and instead just entered the channel numbers, names, and Station IDs into Sage. I found many of these Station IDs on Zap2It because cable/satellite providers and OTA stations redistribute much of the content available from FTA. This scheme pulled EPG data just fine for those channels over the past decade.

However I've been unable to find a way to get this to work with SD. The Sage SD software requires me to specify a lineup for each content source. Because there is no single lineup that contains all of the FTA channels, I tried selecting a placeholder lineup with only a few channels (Juneau OTA in this case). This wiped out my FTA channel list and replaced it with the Juneau channels, as I expected. So I disabled the Juneau channels in Sage and restored my FTA channels from a backup file. At first the results were promising as the FTA portion of the EPG was partially populated from SD. But a number of channels never populated. The Sage developer suggested logging debug, and these channels are receiving error messages from SD:

"33453":{"2017-06-22":{"stationID":"33453","serverID":"20141201.web.1","code":7030,"message":"You have requested a schedule which is not in any of your configured lineups.","lastModified":"1970-01-01T00:00:00Z","md5":"CAFEDEADBEEFCAFEDEADBE","date":"2017-06-22"},

Of course that is true, but that is kind of what I want to do. This particular Station ID (33453) is for the PBS national feed, and frankly I have never been able to find a lineup that includes it, although that may very well exist. As I know of no openly available tools to perform this form of 'reverse lookup', I wouldn't even know where to start if I sought to make a list of all of the lineups I would need to satisfy my FTA channels. Through hook or crook detective work I have found lineups that contain most of the FTA Station IDs I use, but I can't find them all. I could ask SD to allow me to use more lineups, but that would not cover all of my FTA channels, and the one-to-one, lineup-to-source mapping used by Sage would probably prevent this from working regardless.

I'm not 100% sure why some of my FTA channels are populating the EPG. My supposition is either (1) these Station IDs happen to be among the many channels in my subscription satellite lineups that I have disabled because they are not part of the plans that I pay for, or (2) SD allows me a small number of Station ID requests outside of the lineups. I realize SD was likely not designed to service needs like mine. But anyone who uses FTA in the US is likely to have similar problems. Perhaps there is some feature in SD that would allow me to access these Station IDs, but that is unknown to the Sage developer. Thus all I can do is ask here and hope one of these might work:

1. If SD will service a small number of Station IDs not in the declared lineups, can this be increased for my account?

2. If #1 is not currently possible, could it be in the future?

3. Could there be a 'null lineup' that would allow a user to request a limited number of Station IDs?

4. Could there be a community lineup of channels for oddball cases like me?

pendragon wrote:I have four different sources for watching live video in Sage. Three of these are easy (2 subscription satellite providers and 1 local OTA) because they have SD lineups. All of those work fine. But I have several tuners that receive free-to-air (FTA) satellite channels from dozens of satellites. There is no SD lineup that covers those channels.

We tried multiple times to get active FTA users, globally, to help us create the appropriate FTA lineups (which we have as the "ZZZ" lineups.) Other than the initial contact, we didn't hear from anyone.

If you need a ZZZ lineup created, please open a lineup ticket at the Schedules Direct website and we'll see what we can do.